Languages Of The World

Language, the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one another. Language is primarily spoken, although it can be transferred to other media, such as writing. If the spoken means of communication is unavailable, as may be the case among the deaf, visual means such as sign language can be used. A prominent characteristic of language is that the relation between a linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary: There is no reason other than convention among speakers of English that a dog should be called dog, and indeed other languages have different names (for example, Spanish perro, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu). Language can be used to discuss a wide range of topics, a characteristic that distinguishes it from animal communication. The dances of honeybees, for example, can be used only to communicate the location of food sources. While the language-learning abilities of apes have surprised many—and there continues to be controversy over the precise limits of these abilities—scientists and scholars generally agree that apes do not progress beyond the linguistic abilities of a two-year-old child.

Languages constantly undergo changes, resulting in the development of different varieties of the languages.

A dialect is a variety of a language spoken by an identifiable subgroup of people. Traditionally, linguists have applied the term dialect to geographically distinct language varieties, but in current usage the term can include speech varieties characteristic of other socially definable groups. Determining whether two speech varieties are dialects of the same language, or whether they have changed enough to be considered distinct languages, has often proved a difficult and controversial decision. Linguists usually cite mutual intelligibility as the major criterion in making this decision. If two speech varieties are not mutually intelligible, then the speech varieties are different languages; if they are mutually intelligible but differ systematically from one another, then they are dialects of the same language. There are problems with this definition, however, because many levels of mutual intelligibility exist, and linguists must decide at what level speech varieties should no longer be considered mutually intelligible. This is difficult to establish in practice. Intelligibility has a large psychological component: If a speaker of one speech variety wants to understand a speaker of another speech variety, understanding is more likely than if this were not the case. In addition, chains of speech varieties exist in which adjacent speech varieties are mutually intelligible, but speech varieties farther apart in the chain are not. Furthermore, sociopolitical factors almost inevitably intervene in the process of distinguishing between dialects and languages. Such factors, for example, led to the traditional characterization of Chinese as a single language with a number of mutually unintelligible dialects.

Dialects develop primarily as a result of limited communication between different parts of a community that share one language. Under such circumstances, changes that take place in the language of one part of the community do not spread elsewhere. As a result, the speech varieties become more distinct from one another. If contact continues to be limited for a long enough period, sufficient changes will accumulate to make the speech varieties mutually unintelligible. When this occurs, and especially if it is accompanied by the sociopolitical separation of a group of speakers from the larger community, it usually leads to the recognition of separate languages. The different changes that took place in spoken Latin in different parts of the Roman Empire, for example, eventually gave rise to the distinct modern Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian.

In ordinary usage, the term dialect can also signify a variety of a language that is distinct from what is considered the standard form of that language. Linguists, however, consider the standard language to be simply one dialect of a language. For example, the dialect of French spoken in Paris became the standard language of France not because of any linguistic features of this dialect but because Paris was the political and cultural center of the country.

Sociolects are dialects determined by social factors rather than by geography. Sociolects often develop due to social divisions within a society, such as those of socioeconomic class and religion. In New York City, for example, the probability that someone will pronounce the letter r when it occurs at the end of a syllable, as in the word fourth, varies with socioeconomic class. The pronunciation of a final r in general is associated with members of higher socioeconomic classes. The same is true in England of the pronunciation of h, as in hat. Members of certain social groups often adopt a particular pronunciation as a way of distinguishing themselves from other social groups. The inhabitants of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, for example, have adopted particular vowel pronunciations to distinguish themselves from people vacationing on the island.

Slang, argot, and jargon are more specialized terms for certain social language varieties usually defined by their specialized vocabularies. Slang refers to informal vocabulary, especially short-lived coinages, that do not belong to a language's standard vocabulary. Argot refers to a nonstandard vocabulary used by secret groups, particularly criminal organizations, usually intended to render communications incomprehensible to outsiders. A jargon comprises the specialized vocabulary of a particular trade or profession, especially when it is incomprehensible to outsiders, as with legal jargon.

In addition to language varieties defined in terms of social groups, there are language varieties called registers that are defined by social situation. In a formal situation, for example, a person might say, “You are requested to leave,” whereas in an informal situation the same person might say, “Get out!” Register differences can affect pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

A pidgin is an auxiliary language (a language used for communication by groups that have different native tongues) that develops when people speaking different languages are brought together and forced to develop a common means of communication without sufficient time to learn each other's native languages properly. Typically, a pidgin language derives most of its vocabulary from one of the languages. Its grammatical structure, however, will either be highly variable, reflecting the grammatical structures of each speaker's native language, or it may in time become stabilized in a manner very different from the grammar of the language that contributed most of its vocabulary. Historically, plantation societies in the Caribbean and the South Pacific have originated many pidgin languages. Tok Pisin is the major pidgin language of Papua New Guinea. Both its similarities to and its differences from English can be seen in the sentence “Pik bilong dispela man i kam pinis,” meaning “This man's pig has come,” or, more literally, “Pig belong this-fellow man he come finish.”

Since a pidgin is an auxiliary language, it has no native speakers. A creole language, on the other hand, arises in a contact situation similar to that, which produces pidgin languages and perhaps goes through a stage in which it is a pidgin, but a creole becomes the native language of its community. As with pidgin languages, creoles usually take most of their vocabulary from a single language. Also as with pidgins, the grammatical structure of a creole language reflects the structures of the languages that were originally spoken in the community. A characteristic of creole languages is their simple morphology. In the Jamaican Creole sentence “A fain Jan fain di kluoz,” meaning “John found the clothes,” the vocabulary is of English origin, while the grammatical structure, which doubles the verb for emphasis, reflects West African language patterns. Because the vocabularies of Tok Pisin and Jamaican Creole are largely of English origin, they are called English-based.

Estimates of the number of languages spoken in the world today vary depending on where the dividing line between language and dialect is drawn. For instance, linguists disagree over whether Chinese should be considered a single language because of its speakers' shared cultural and literary tradition, or whether it should be considered several different languages because of the mutual unintelligibility of, for example, the Mandarin spoken in Beijing and the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong. If mutual intelligibility is the basic criterion, current estimates indicate that there are about 6000 languages spoken in the world today. However, many languages with a smaller number of speakers are in danger of being replaced by languages with large numbers of speakers. In fact, some scholars believe that perhaps 90 percent of the languages spoken in the 1990s will be extinct or doomed to extinction by the end of the 21st century. The 12 most widely spoken languages, with approximate numbers of native speakers, are as follows: Mandarin Chinese, 836 million; Hindi, 333 million; Spanish, 332 million; English, 322 million; Bengali, 189 million; Arabic, 186 million; Russian, 170 million; Portuguese, 170 million; Japanese, 125 million; German, 98 million; French, 72 million; Malay, 50 million. If second-language speakers are included in these figures, English is the second most widely spoken language, with 418 million speakers.

Linguists classify languages using two main classification systems: typological and genetic. A typological classification system organizes languages according to the similarities and differences in their structures. Languages that share the same structure belong to the same type, while languages with different structures belong to different types. For example, despite the great differences between the two languages in other respects, Mandarin Chinese and English belong to the same type, grouped by word-order typology. Both languages have a basic word order of subject-verb-object.

A genetic classification of languages divides them into families on the basis of their historical development: A group of languages that descend historically from the same common ancestor form a language family. For example, the Romance languages form a language family because they all descended from the Latin language. Latin, in turn, belongs to a larger language family, Indo-European, the ancestor language of which is called Proto-Indo-European. Some genetic groupings are universally accepted. However, because documents attesting to the form of most ancestor languages, including Proto-Indo-European, have not survived, much controversy surrounds the more wide-ranging genetic groupings. A conservative survey of the world's language families follows.

The Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages in Europe, and they also extend into western and southern Asia. The family consists of a number of subfamilies or branches (groups of languages that descended from a common ancestor, which in turn is a member of a larger group of languages that descended from a common ancestor). Most of the people in northwestern Europe speak Germanic languages, which include English, German, and Dutch as well as the Scandinavian languages, such as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Celtic languages, such as Welsh and Gaelic, once covered a large part of Europe but are now restricted to its western fringes. The Romance languages, all descended from Latin, are the only survivors of a somewhat more extensive family, Italic, which includes, in addition to Latin, a number of now extinct languages of Italy. Languages of the Baltic and Slavic (Slavonic) branches are closely related. Only two of the Baltic languages survive: Lithuanian and Latvian. The Slavic languages, which cover much of eastern and central Europe, include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. In the Balkan Peninsula, two branches of Indo-European exist that each consist of a single language—namely the Greek language and the Albanian language. Farther east, in Caucasia, the Armenian language constitutes another single-language branch of Indo-European.

The other main surviving branch of the Indo-European family is Indo-Iranian. It has two subbranches, Iranian and Indo-Aryan (Indic). Iranian languages are spoken mainly in southwestern Asia and include Persian, Pashto (spoken in Afghanistan), and Kurdish. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in the northern part of South Asia (Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh) and also in most of Sri Lanka. This branch includes Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhalese (the language spoken by the majority of people in Sri Lanka). Historical documents attest to other, now extinct, branches of Indo-European, such as the Anatolian languages, which were once spoken in what is now Turkey and include the ancient Hittite language.

The Uralic languages constitute the other main language family of Europe. They are spoken mostly in the northeastern part of the continent, spilling over into northwestern Asia; one language, Hungarian, is spoken in central Europe. Most Uralic languages belong to the family's Finno-Ugric branch. This branch includes (in addition to Hungarian) Finnish, Estonian, and Saami. Europe also has one language isolate (a language not known to be related to any other language): Basque, which is spoken in the Pyrenees. At the boundary between southeastern Europe and Asia lie the Caucasus Mountains. Since ancient times the region has contained a large number of languages, including two groups of languages that have not been definitively related to any other language families. The South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, languages are spoken in Georgia and include the Georgian language. The North Caucasian languages fall into North-West Caucasian, North-Central Caucasian, and North-East Caucasian subgroups. The genetic relation of North-West Caucasian to the other subgroups is not universally agreed upon. The North-West Caucasian languages include Abkhaz, the North-Central Caucasian languages include Chechen, and the North-East Caucasian languages include the Avar language.

South Asia contains, in addition to the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European, two other large language families. The Dravidian family is dominant in southern India and includes Tamil and Telugu. The Munda languages represent the Austro-Asiatic language family in India and contain many languages, each with relatively small numbers of speakers. The Austro-Asiatic family also spreads into Southeast Asia, where it includes the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese languages. South Asia contains at least one language isolate, Burushaski, spoken in a remote part of northern Pakistan.

A number of linguists believe that many of the languages of central, northern, and eastern Asia form a single Altaic language family, although others consider Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic to be separate, unrelated language families. The Turkic languages include Turkish and a number of languages of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), such as Uzbek and Tatar. The Tungusic languages are spoken mainly by small population groups in Siberia and Northeast China. This family includes the nearly extinct Manchu language. The main language of the Mongolic family is Mongolian. Some linguists also assign Korean and Japanese to the Altaic family, although others regard these languages as isolates. In northern Asia there are a number of languages that appear either to form small, independent families or to be language isolates, such as the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family of the Chukot and Kamchatka peninsulas in the Far East of Russia. These languages are often referred to collectively as Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic), but this is a geographic, not a genetic,

The Sino-Tibetan language family covers not only most of China, but also much of the Himalayas and parts of Southeast Asia. The family's major languages are Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. The Tai languages constitute another important language family of Southeast Asia. They are spoken in Thailand, Laos, and southern China and include the Thai language. The Miao-Yao, or Hmong-Mien, languages are spoken in isolated areas of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. The Austronesian languages, formerly called Malayo-Polynesian, cover the Malay Peninsula and most islands to the southeast of Asia and are spoken as far west as Madagascar and throughout the Pacific islands as far east as Easter Island. The Austronesian languages include Malay (called Bahasa Malaysia in Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia), Javanese, Hawaiian, and Maori (the language of the aboriginal people of New Zealand).

Although the inhabitants of some of the coastal areas and offshore islands of New Guinea speak Austronesian languages, most of the main island's inhabitants, as well as some inhabitants of nearby islands, speak languages unrelated to Austronesian. Linguists collectively refer to these languages as Papuan languages, although this is a geographical term covering about 60 different language families. The languages of the Australian Aborigines constitute another unrelated group, and it is debatable whether

The languages of Africa may belong to as few as four families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan,although the genetic unity of Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan is still disputed. Afro-Asiatic languages occupy most of North Africa and also large parts of southwestern Asia. The family consists of several branches. The Semitic branch includes Arabic, Hebrew, and many languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia. The Chadic branch, spoken

mainly in northern Nigeria and adjacent areas, includes Hausa, one of the two most widely spoken languages of sub-Saharan Africa (the other being Swahili). Other subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic are Berber, Cushitic, and the single-language branch Egyptian, which contains the now-extinct language of the ancient Egyptians.

The Niger-Congo family covers most of sub-Saharan Africa and includes such widely spoken West African languages as Yoruba and Fulani, as well as the Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa, which include Swahili and Zulu. The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken mainly in eastern Africa, in an area between those covered by the Afro-Asiatic and the Niger-Congo languages. The best-known Nilo-Saharan language is Masai, spoken by the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania. The Khoisan languages are spoken in the southwestern corner of Africa and include the Nama language (formerly called Hottentot).

FIGURE-4:This map shows the distribution of the main dialects of the Chinese language, a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. These dialects are sometimes classified as separate languages because of their mutual unintelligibility. In addition to the area shown here, Chinese is also spoken by a large number of emigrants throughout Southeast Asia, North and South America, and the Hawaiian Islands, making it the most widely spoken language in the world.

Some linguists group all indigenous languages of the Americas into just three families, while most separate them into a large number of families and isolates. Well-established families include Eskimo-Aleut. The family stretches from the eastern edge of Siberia to the Aleutian Islands, and across Alaska and northern Canada to Greenland, where one variety of the Inuit (Eskimo) language, Greenlandic, is an official language. The Na-Dené languages, the main branch of which comprises the Athapaskan languages, occupies much of northwestern North America. The Athapaskan languages also include, however, a group of languages in the southwestern United States, one of which is Navajo. Languages of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families constitute the major indigenous languages of northeastern North America, while the Siouan family is one of the main families of central North America.

The Uto-Aztecan family extends from the southwestern United States into Central America and includes Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec civilization and its modern descendants. The Mayan languages are spoken mainly in southern Mexico and Guatemala. Major language families of South America include Carib and Arawak in the north, and Macro-Gê and Tupian in the east. Guaraní, recognized as a national language in Paraguay alongside the official language, Spanish, is an important member of the Tupian family. In the Andes Mountains region, the dominant indigenous languages are Quechua and Aymara; the genetic relation of these languages to each other and to other languages remains controversial.

Individual pidgin and creole languages pose a particular problem for genetic classification because the vocabulary and grammar of each comes from different sources. Consequently, many linguists do not try to classify them genetically. Pidgin and creole languages are found in many parts of the world, but there are particular concentrations in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the islands of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. English-based creoles such as Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole, and French-based creoles such as Haitian Creole, can be found in the Caribbean. English-based creoles are widespread in West Africa. About 10 percent of the population of Sierra Leone speaks Krio as a native language, and an additional 85 percent speaks it as a second language. The creoles of the Indian Ocean islands, such as Mauritius, are French-based. An English-based pidgin, Tok Pisin, is spoken by more than 2 million people in Papua New Guinea, making it the most widely spoken auxiliary language of that country. The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu speak similar varieties of Tok Pisin, called Pijin and Bislama, respectively.

Geographic Distribution of Living Languages, 1996

Total Living Languages Percentage

The Americas 1,000 15%

Africa 2,011 30%

Europe 225 3%

Asia 2,165 32%

The Pacific 1,302 19%

TOTAL 6,703

International languages include both existing languages that have become international means of communication and languages artificially constructed to serve this purpose. The most famous and widespread artificial international language is Esperanto; however, the most widespread international languages are not artificial. In medieval Europe, Latin was the principal international language. Today, English is used in more countries as an official language or as the main means of international communication than any other language. French is the second most widely used language, largely due to the substantial number of African countries with French as their official language. Other languages have more restricted regional use, such as Spanish in Spain and Latin America, Arabic in the Middle East, and Russian in the republics of the former USSR.

Chinese Language, language of the Chinese, or Han, people, the majority ethnic group of China, including both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. It is the official language of China and one of the official languages of Singapore. Of China's more than 1 billion people, approximately 95 percent speak Chinese, as opposed to the non-Chinese languages-such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai-spoken by minorities. Chinese is also spoken by large emigrant communities, such as those in Southeast Asia, North and South America, and the Hawaiian Islands. More people speak Chinese than any other language in the world.

As the dominant language of East Asia, Chinese has greatly influenced the writing systems and vocabularies of neighboring languages not related to it by origin, such as the Japanese language, the Korean language, and the Vietnamese language. It has been estimated that until the 18th century more than half of the world's printed books were Chinese.

English Language, chief medium of communication of people in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and numerous other countries. It is the official language of many nations in the Commonwealth of Nations and is widely understood and used in all of them. It is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and by more people than any other tongue except Chinese.

English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the Germanic languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is related most closely to the Frisian language, to a lesser extent to Netherlandic (Dutch-Flemish) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, and more distantly to Modern High German.

French Language, a member of the Romance language group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is the language of the people of France and is also spoken in parts of Belgium and Switzerland, and in present and former French colonies, including French Guiana, northwestern Africa, Indochina, Haiti, Madagascar, and parts of Canada.

Japanese Language, official language of Japan, spoken by virtually all of the country's approximately 125 million inhabitants, and by Japanese living in Hawaii, the Americas, and elsewhere. It is also spoken as a second language by Chinese and Korean people who lived under Japanese occupation during the first half of the 20th century.

Portuguese Language, one of the Romance languages. Like all other languages of the group, Portuguese is a direct modern descendant of Latin, the vernacular Latin of the Roman soldier and colonist rather than the classical Latin of the cultured Roman citizen. It developed in ancient Gallaeci (modern Galicia, in northwestern Spain) and in northern Portugal and then spread throughout present-day Portugal. Portuguese resembles Spanish more than it does any of the other Romance tongues. Like Spanish, it contains a very large number of words of Arabic origin, and like other modern languages, its vocabulary contains also a great many words of French and Greek origin. A very small number of words are derived from Carthaginian, Celtic, and Phoenician. Portuguese is spoken in Portugal; Galicia (in a dialect called Galician); Brazil; several islands in the Atlantic Ocean; Angola, Mozambique, and other former colonies in Africa and Asia; and parts of Indonesia.

Portuguese is the official language of Brazil. Technically, it is a dialect of Portuguese; with some differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax, it bears the same relationship to the Portuguese of Portugal as American English does to British English.

Russian Language

Russian language, official language of Russia. Russian was the lingua franca of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union; it is still used as a second language in the other former Soviet republics. It is also known as Great Russian and forms, with Belarusian and Ukrainian, the eastern branch of the Slavic languages. Russian includes three groups of dialects: northern, southern, and central, the last named a transitional group combining northern and southern features. The southern and central dialects are distinguished by the so-called akan'je, coalescence of certain vowels outside of stress. The standard Russian is based on a central dialect of Moscow. It is one of the five official languages of the United Nations.

Spanish Language

Spanish Language, member of the Romance group in the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European language family, spoken chiefly in the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America. The Spanish language was carried by Spanish colonists to the Canary Islands, the Antilles, the Philippines, southern North America, the greater part of South America, and the coast of Africa. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish-language area does not coincide exactly with the political boundaries of Spain. Spain contains three non-Spanish-speaking regions: Galicia, in the northwest, where Gallegan (technically a dialect of Portuguese) is spoken; the Basque provinces, in the north, where Basque, a unique agglutinative language, is spoken; and Catalonia, along the east coast, where Catalan, also a Romance language, is spoken. Catalan is also spoken in the Balearic Islands; in France, in the Pyrénées-Orientales; and in parts of Cuba and Argentina.

Nonoral Language

Language, although primarily oral, can also be represented in other media, such as writing. Under certain circumstances, spoken language can be supplanted by other media, as in sign language among the deaf . Writing can be viewed in one sense as a more permanent physical record of the spoken language. However, written and spoken languages tend to diverge from one another, partly because of the difference in medium. In spoken language, the structure of a message cannot be too complex because of the risk that the listener will misunderstand the message. Since the communication is face-to-face, however, the speaker has the opportunity to receive feedback from the listener and to clarify what the listener does not understand. Sentence structures in written communication can be more complex because readers can return to an earlier part of the text to clarify their understanding. However, the writer usually does not have the opportunity to receive feedback from the reader and to rework the text, so texts must be written with greater clarity. An example of this difference between written and spoken language is found in languages that have only recently developed written variants. In the written variants there is a rapid increase in the use of words such as because and however in order to make explicit links between sentences—links that are normally left implicit in spoken language.

Sign languages, which differ from signed versions of spoken languages, are the native languages of most members of deaf communities. Linguists have only recently begun to appreciate the levels of complexity and expressiveness found in sign languages. In particular, as in oral languages, sign languages are generally arbitrary in their use of signs: In general, no reason exists, other than convention, for a certain sign to have a particular meaning. Sign languages also exhibit dual patterning, in which a small number of components combine to produce the total range of signs, similar to the way in which letters combine to make words in English. In addition, sign languages use complex syntax and can discuss the same wide range of topics possible in spoken languages.

Body language refers to the conveying of messages through body movements other than those movements that form a part of sign or spoken languages. Some gestures can have quite specific meanings, such as those for saying good-bye or for asking someone to approach. Other gestures more generally accompany speech, such as those used to emphasize a particular point. Although there are cross-cultural similarities in body language, substantial differences also exist both in the extent to which body language is used and in the interpretations given to particular instances of body language. For example, the head gestures for “yes” and “no” used in the Balkans seem inverted to other Europeans. Also, the physical distance kept between participants in a conversation varies from culture to culture: A distance considered normal in one culture can strike someone from another culture as aggressively close.

In certain circumstances, other media can be used to convey linguistic messages, particularly when normal media are unavailable. For example, Morse code directly encodes a written message, letter by letter, so that it can be transmitted by a medium that allows only two values—traditionally, short and long signals or dots and dashes. Drums can be used to convey messages over distances beyond the human voice's reach—a method known as drum talk. In some cases, such communication methods serve the function of keeping a message secret from the uninitiated. This is often the case with whistle speech, a form of communication in which whistling substitutes for regular speech, usually used for communication over distances.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Several of the subfields of linguistics that will be discussed here are concerned with the major components of language: Phonetics is concerned with the sounds of languages, phonology with the way sounds are used in individual languages, morphology with the structure of words, syntax with the structure of phrases and sentences, and semantics with the study of meaning. Another major subfield of linguistics, pragmatics, studies the interaction between language and the contexts in which it is used. Synchronic linguistics studies a language's form at a fixed time in history, past or present. Diachronic, or historical, linguistics, on the other hand, investigates the way a language changes over time. A number of linguistic fields study the relations between language and the subject matter of related academic disciplines, such as sociolinguistics (sociology and language) and psycholinguistics (psychology and language). In principle, applied linguistics is any application of linguistic methods or results to solve problems related to language, but in practice it tends to be restricted to second-language instruction.

Spoken human language is composed of sounds that do not in themselves have meaning, but that can be combined with other sounds to create entities that do have meaning. Thus p, e, and n do not in themselves have any meaning, but the combination pen does have a meaning. Language also is characterized by complex syntax whereby elements, usually words, are combined into more complex constructions, called phrases, and these constructions in turn play a major role in the structures of sentences.

Because most languages are primarily spoken, an important part of the overall understanding of language involves the study of the sounds of language.

Most sounds in the world's languages—and all sounds in some languages, such as English—are produced by expelling air from the lungs and modifying the vocal tract between the larynx and the lips. For instance, the sound p requires complete closure of the lips, so that air coming from the lungs builds up pressure in the mouth, giving rise to the characteristic popping sound when the lip closure is released. For the sound s, air from the lungs passes continuously through the mouth, but the tongue is raised sufficiently close to the alveolar ridge (the section of the upper jaw containing the tooth sockets) to cause friction as it partially blocks the air that passes. Sounds also can be produced by means other than expelling air from the lungs, and some languages use these sounds in regular speech. The sound used by English speakers to express annoyance, often spelled tsk or tut, uses air trapped in the space between the front of the tongue, the back of the tongue, and the palate. Such sounds, called clicks, function as regular speech sounds in the Khoisan languages of southwestern Africa and in the Bantu languages of neighboring African peoples.

Phonetics is the field of language study concerned with the physical properties of sounds, and it has three subfields. Articulatory phonetics explores how the human vocal apparatus produces sounds. Acoustic phonetics studies the sound waves produced by the human vocal apparatus. Auditory phonetics examines how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear. Phonology, in contrast, is concerned not with the physical properties of sounds, but rather with how they function in a particular language. The following example illustrates the difference between phonetics and phonology. In the English language, when the sound k (usually spelled c) occurs at the beginning of a word, as in the word cut, it is pronounced with aspiration (a puff of breath). However, when this sound occurs at the end of a word, as in tuck, there is no aspiration. Phonetically, the aspirated k and unaspirated k are different sounds, but in English these different sounds never distinguish one word from another, and English speakers are usually unaware of the phonetic difference until it is pointed out to them. Thus English makes no phonological distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k. The Hindi language, on the other hand, uses this sound difference to distinguish words such as kal (time), which has an unaspirated k, and khal (skin), in which kh represents the aspirated k. Therefore, in Hindi the distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k is both phonetic and phonological.

While many people, influenced by writing, tend to think of words as the basic units of grammatical structure, linguists recognize a smaller unit, the morpheme. The word cats, for instance, consists of two elements, or morphemes: cat, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as “feline animal,” and -s, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as “more than one.” Antimicrobial, meaning “capable of destroying microorganisms,” can be divided into the morphemes anti- (against), microbe (microorganism), and -ial, a suffix that makes the word an adjective. The study of these smallest grammatical units, and the ways in which they combine into words, is called morphology.

Syntax is the study of how words combine to make sentences. The order of words in sentences varies from language to language. English-language syntax, for instance, generally follows a subject-verb-object order, as in the sentence “The dog (subject) bit (verb) the man (object).” The sentence “The dog the man bit” is not a correct construction in English, and the sentence “The man bit the dog” has a very different meaning. In contrast, Japanese has a basic word order of subject-object-verb, as in “watakushi-wa hon-o kau,” which literally translates to “I book buy.” Hixkaryana, spoken by about 400 people on a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil, has a basic word order of object-verb-subject. The sentence “toto yahosïye kamara,” which literally translates to “Man grabbed jaguar,” actually means that the jaguar grabbed the man, not that the man grabbed the jaguar.

A general characteristic of language is that words are not directly combined into sentences, but rather into intermediate units, called phrases, which then are combined into sentences. The sentence “The shepherd found the lost sheep” contains at least three phrases: “the shepherd,” “found,” and “the lost sheep.” This hierarchical structure that groups words into phrases, and phrases into sentences, serves an important role in establishing relations within sentences. For instance, the phrases “the shepherd” and “the lost sheep” behave as units, so that when the sentence is rearranged to be in the passive voice, these units stay intact: “The lost sheep was found by the shepherd.”

While the fields of language study mentioned above deal primarily with the form of linguistic elements, semantics is the field of study that deals with the meaning of these elements. A prominent part of semantics deals with the meaning of individual morphemes. Semantics also involves studying the meaning of the constructions that link morphemes to form phrases and sentences. For instance, the sentences “The dog bit the man” and “The man bit the dog” contain exactly the same morphemes, but they have different meanings. This is because the morphemes enter into different constructions in each sentence, reflected in the different word orders of the two sentences.

Languages continually undergo changes, although speakers of a language are usually unaware of the changes as they are occurring. For instance, American English has an ongoing change whereby the pronunciation difference between the words cot and caught is being lost. The changes become more dramatic after longer periods of time. Modern English readers may require notes to understand fully the writings of English playwright William Shakespeare, who wrote during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The English of 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer differs so greatly from the modern language that many readers prefer a translation into modern English. Learning to read the writings of Alfred the Great, the 9th-century Saxon king, is comparable to acquiring a reading knowledge of German.

Historical change can affect all components of language. Sound change is the area of language change that has received the most study. One of the major sound changes in the history of the English language is the so-called Great Vowel Shift. This shift, which occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, affected the pronunciation of all English long vowels (vowels that have a comparatively long sound duration). In Middle English, spoken from 1100 to 1500, the word house was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English word boot, while boot was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English boat. The change that affected the pronunciation of house also affected the vowels of mouse, louse, and mouth. This illustrates an important principle of sound change: It tends to be regular—that is, a particular sound change in a language tends to occur in the same way in all words.

The principle of the regularity of sound change has been particularly important to linguists when comparing different languages for genetic relatedness. Linguists compare root words from the different languages to see if they are similar enough to have once been the same word in a common ancestor language. By establishing that the sound differences between similar root words are the result of regular sound changes that occurred in the languages, linguists can support the conclusion that the different languages descended from the same original language. For example, by comparing the Latin word pater with its English translation, father, linguists might claim that the two languages are genetically related because of certain similarities between the two words. Linguists could then hypothesize that the Latin p had changed to f in English, and that the two words descended from the same original word. They could search for other examples to strengthen this hypothesis, such as the Latin word piscis and its English translation, fish, and the Latin pes and the English translation, foot. The sound change that relates f in the Germanic languages to p in most other branches of Indo-European is a famous sound change called Grimm's Law, named for German grammarian Jacob Grimm.

The morphology of a language can also change. An ongoing morphological change in English is the loss of the distinction between the nominative, or subject, form who and the accusative, or object, form whom. English speakers use both the who and whom forms for the object of a sentence, saying both “Who did you see?” and “Whom did you see?” However, English speakers use only the form who for a sentence's subject, as in “Who saw you?” Old English, the historical form of English spoken from about 700 to about 1100, had a much more complex morphology than modern English. The modern English word stone has only three additional forms: the genitive singular stone's, the plural stones, and the genitive plural stones'. All three of these additional forms have the same pronunciation. In Old English these forms were all different from one another: stan, stanes, stanas, and stana, respectively. In addition, there was a dative singular form stane and a dative plural form stanum, used, for instance, after certain prepositions, as in under stanum (under stones).

Change can also affect syntax. In modern English, the basic word order is subject-verb-object, as in the sentence “I know John.” The only other possible word order is object-subject-verb, as in “John I know (but Mary I don't).” Old English, by contrast, allowed all possible word order permutations, including subject-object-verb, as in Gif hie ænigne feld secan wolden, meaning “If they wished to seek any field,” or literally “If they any field to seek wished.” The loss of word-order freedom is one of the main syntactic changes that separates the modern English language from Old English.

The meanings of words can also change. In Middle English, the word nice usually had the meaning “foolish,” and sometimes “shy,” but never the modern meaning “pleasant.” Change in the meanings of words is known as semantic change and can be viewed as part of the more general phenomenon of lexical change, or change in a language's vocabulary. Words not only can change their meaning but also can become obsolete. For example, modern readers require a note to explain Shakespeare's word hent (take hold of), which is no longer in use. In addition, new words can be created, such as feedback.

While much change takes place in a given language without outside interference, many changes can result from contact with other languages. Linguists use the terms borrowing and loan to refer to instances in which one language takes something from another language. The most obvious cases of borrowing are in vocabulary. English, for example, has borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from French and Latin. Most of these borrowed words are somewhat more scholarly, as in the word human (Latin humanus), because the commonly used words of any language are less likely to be lost or replaced. However, some of the words borrowed into English are common, such as the French word very, which replaced the native English word sore in such phrases as sore afraid, meaning “very frightened.” The borrowing of such common words reflects the close contact that existed between the English and the French in the period after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

Borrowing can affect not only vocabulary but also, in principle, all components of a language's grammar. The English suffix -er, which is added to verbs to form nouns, as in the formation of baker from bake, is ultimately a borrowing from the Latin suffix -arius. The suffix has been incorporated to such an extent, however, that it is used with indigenous words, such as bake, as well as with Latin words. Syntax also can be borrowed. For example, Amharic, a Semitic language of Ethiopia, has abandoned the usual Semitic word-order pattern, verb-subject-object, and replaced it with the word order subject-object-verb, borrowed from neighboring non-Semitic languages. Although in principle any component of language can be borrowed, some components are much more susceptible to borrowing than others. Cultural vocabulary is the most susceptible to borrowing, while morphology is the least susceptible.

Linguistic reconstruction is the recovery of the stages of a language that existed prior to those found in written documents. Using a number of languages that are genetically related, linguists try to reconstruct at least certain aspects of the languages' common ancestor, called the protolanguage. Linguists theorize that those features that are the same among the protolanguage's descendant languages, or those features that differ but can be traced to a common origin, can be considered features of the ancestor language. Nineteenth-century linguistic science made significant progress in reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language. While many details of this reconstruction remain controversial, in general linguists have gained a good conception of Proto-Indo-European's phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. However, due to the range of syntactic variation among Proto-Indo-European's descendant languages, linguists have found syntactic reconstruction more problematic.

Discovery magazine article

This article from Discover Magazine discusses the massive extinction of human languages that has taken place worldwide over the last few centuries, and the enormous consequences that such loss has had on the richness of the world's cultural heritage.

“Kópipi! Kópipi!” In jungle on the Pacific Island of Bougainville, a man from the village of Rotokas was excitedly pointing out the most beautiful birdsong I had ever heard. It consisted of silver-clear whistled tones and trills, grouped in slowly rising phrases of two or three notes, each phrase different from the next. The effect was like one of Schubert's deceptively simple songs. I never succeeded in glimpsing the singer, nor have any of the other ornithologists who have subsequently visited Bougainville and listened spellbound to its song. All we know of the kópipi bird is that name for it in the Rotokas language and descriptions of it by Rotokas villagers.

As I talked with my guide, I gradually realized that the extraordinary music of Bougainville's mountains included not only the kópipi's song but also the sounds of the Rotokas language. My guide named one bird after another: kópipi, kurupi, vokupi, kopikau, kororo, keravo, kurue, vikuroi.… The only consonant sounds in those names are k, p, r, and v. Later I learned that the Rotokas language has only six consonant sounds, the fewest of any known language in the world. English, by comparison, has 24, while other languages have 80 or more. Somehow the people of Rotokas, living in a tropical rain forest on one of the highest mountains of the southwest Pacific, have managed to build a rich vocabulary and communicate clearly while relying on fewer basic sounds than any other people.

But the music of their language is now disappearing from Bougainville's mountains, and from the world. The Rotokas language is just one of 18 languages spoken on an island roughly three-quarters the size of Connecticut. At last count it was spoken by only 4,320 people, and the number is declining. With its vanishing, a 30,000-year history of human communication and cultural development is coming to an end.

That vanishing exemplifies a little-noticed tragedy looming over us: the possible loss of 90 percent of our creative heritage, linked with the loss of 90 percent of our languages. We hear much anguished discussion about the accelerating disappearance of indigenous cultures as our Coca-Cola civilization spreads over the world. Much less attention has been paid to the disappearance of languages themselves and to their essential role in the survival of those indigenous cultures. Each language is the vehicle for a unique way of thinking, a unique literature, and a unique view of the world. Only now are linguists starting seriously to estimate the world's rate of language loss and to debate what to do about it.

If the present rate of disappearance continues, our 6,000 modern languages could be reduced within a century or two to just a few hundred. Time is running out even to study the others. Hence linguists face a race against time similar to that faced by biologists, now aware that many of the world's plant and animal species are in danger of extinction.

To begin to understand the problem, we should take a look at how the world's languages are divvied up. If the global population of about 5.5 billion humans were equally distributed among its 6,000 tongues, then each language would have roughly 900,000 speakers—enough to give each language a fair chance of survival. Of course, the vast majority of people use only one of a few “big” languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, English, or Spanish, each with hundreds of millions of native speakers. The vast majority of languages are “little” ones, with a median number of perhaps only 5,000 speakers.

Our 6,000 languages are also unevenly distributed over the globe. Western Europe is especially poorly endowed, with about 45 native languages. In 1788, when European settlement of Australia began, aboriginal Australia was considerably richer: it had 250 languages, despite having far fewer people than Western Europe. The Americas at the time of Columbus's arrival were richer yet: more than 1,000 languages. But the richest region of the globe, then and now, is New Guinea and other Pacific islands, with only 8 million people, or less than .2 percent of the world's population, but about 1,400 languages, or almost 25 percent of the world's total! While New Guinea itself stands out with about 1,000 of those languages, other neighboring archipelagoes are also well endowed—Vanuatu, for example, with about 105, and the Philippines with 160.

Many New Guinea languages are so distinctive that they have no proven relationship with any other language in the world, not even with any other New Guinea language. As I travel across New Guinea, every 10 or 20 miles I pass between tribes with languages as different as English is from Chinese. And most of those languages are “tiny” ones, with fewer than 1,000 speakers.

How did these enormous geographic differences in linguistic diversity arise? Partly, of course, from differences in topography and human population density. But there's another reason as well: the original linguistic diversity of many areas has been homogenized by expansions of political states in the last several thousand years, and by expansions of farmers in the last 10,000 years. New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Philippines, and aboriginal Australia were exceptional in never having been unified by a native empire. To us, the British and Spanish empires may be the most familiar examples of centralized states that imposed their state language on conquered peoples. However, the Inca and Aztec empires similarly imposed Quechua and Nahuatl on their Indian subjects before A.D. 1500. Long before the rise of political states, expansions of farmers must have wiped out thousands of hunter-gatherer languages. For instance, the expansion of Indo-European farmers and herders that began around 4000 B.C. eradicated all preexisting Western European languages except Basque.

I'd guess that before expansions of farmers began in earnest around 6000 B.C. the world harbored tens of thousands of languages. If so, then we may already have lost much of the world's linguistic diversity. Of those vanished languages, a few—such as Etruscan, Hittite, and Sumerian—lingered long enough to be written down and preserved for us. Far more languages, though, have vanished without a trace. Who knows what the speech of the Huns and the Picts, and of uncounted nameless peoples, sounded like?

As linguists have begun surveying the status of our surviving languages, it has become clear that prognoses for future survival vary enormously. Here are some calculations made by linguist Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Presumably among the languages with the most secure futures are the official national languages of the world's sovereign states, which now number 170 or so. However, most states have officially adopted English, French, Spanish, Arabic, or Portuguese, leaving only about 70 states to opt for other languages. Even if one counts regional languages, such as the 15 specified in India's constitution, that yields at best a few hundred languages officially protected anywhere in the world. Alternatively, one might consider languages with over a million speakers as secure, regardless of their official status, but that definition also yields only 200 or so secure languages, many of which duplicate the list of official languages. What's happening to the other 5,800 of the world's 6,000?

As an illustration of their fates, consider Alaska's 20 native Eskimo and Indian languages. The Eyak language, formerly spoken by a few hundred Indians on Alaska's south coast, had declined by 1982 to two native speakers, Marie Smith (age 72) and her sister Sophie Borodkin. Their children speak only English. With Sophie Borodkin's death last year at the age of 80, the language world of the Eyak people reached its final silence—except when Marie Smith speaks Eyak with Michael Krauss. Seventeen other native Alaskan languages are moribund, in that not a single child is learning them. Although they are still being spoken by older people, they too will meet the fate of Eyak when the last of those speakers dies; in addition, almost all of them have fewer than 1,000 speakers each. That leaves only two native Alaskan languages still being learned by children and thus not yet doomed: Siberian Yupik, with 1,000 speakers, and Central Yupik, with a grand total of 10,000 speakers.

The situation is similar for the 187 Indian languages surviving in North America outside Alaska, such as Chickasaw, Navajo, and Nootka. Krauss estimates that 149 of these are already moribund. Even Navajo, the language with by far the largest number of speakers (around 100,000), has a doubtful future, as many or most Navajo children now speak only English. Language extinction is even further advanced in aboriginal Australia, where only 100 of the original 250 languages are still spoken or even remembered, and only 7 have more than 1,000 speakers. At best, only 2 or 3 of those aboriginal languages will retain their vitality throughout our lifetime.

In monographs summarizing the current status of languages, one encounters the same types of phrase monotonously repeated. “Ubykh [a language of the northwest Caucasus] … one speaker definitely still alive, perhaps two or three more.” “Vilela [sole surviving language of a group of Indian languages in Argentina] … spoken by only two individuals.” “The last speaker of Cupeño [an Indian language of southern California], Roscinda Nolasquez of Pala, California, died in 1987 at the age of 94.” Putting these status reports together, it appears that up to half of the world's surviving languages are no longer being learned by children. By some time in the coming century, Krauss estimates, all but perhaps a few hundred languages could be dead or moribund.

Why is the rate of language disappearance accelerating so steeply now, when so many languages used to be able to persist with only a few hundred speakers in places like traditional New Guinea? Why do declining languages include not only small ones but also ones with many speakers, including Breton (around 100,000) and even Quechua (8.5 million)? Just as there are different ways of killing people—by a quick blow to the head, slow strangulation, or prolonged neglect—so too are there different ways of eradicating a language.

The most direct way, of course, is to kill almost all its speakers. This was how white Californians eliminated the Yahi Indian language between 1853 and 1870, and how British colonists eliminated all the native languages of Tasmania between 1803 and 1835. Another direct way is for governments to forbid and punish use of minority languages. If you wondered why 149 out of 187 North American Indian languages are now moribund, just consider the policy practiced until recently by the U.S. government regarding those languages. For several centuries we insisted that Indians could be “civilized” and taught English only by removing children from the “barbarous” atmosphere of their parents' homes to English-language-only boarding schools, where use of Indian languages was absolutely forbidden and punished with physical abuse and humiliation.

But in most cases language loss proceeds by the more insidious process now underway at Rotokas. With political unification of an area formerly occupied by sedentary warring tribes comes peace, mobility, intermarriage, and schools. Mixed couples may have no common language except the majority language (for example, English or Pidgin English in Papua New Guinea, the nation to which Bougainville belongs). Young people in search of economic opportunity abandon their native-speaking villages and move to mixed urban centers, where again they have no option except to speak the majority language. Their children's schools speak the majority language. Even their parents remaining in the village learn the majority language for its access to prestige, trade, and power. Newspapers, radio, and TV overwhelmingly use majority languages understood by most consumers, advertisers, and subscribers. (In the United States, the only native languages regularly broadcast are Navajo and Yupik.)

The usual result is that minority young adults tend to become bilingual, then their children become monolingual in the majority language. Eventually the minority language is spoken only by older people, until the last of them dies. Long before that end is reached, the minority language has degenerated through loss of its grammatical complexities, loss of forgotten native words, and incorporation of foreign vocabulary and grammatical features.

Those are the overwhelming facts of worldwide language extinction. But now let's play devil's advocate and ask, So what? Are we really so sure this loss is a terrible thing? Isn't the existence of thousands of languages positively harmful, first because they impede communication, and second because they promote strife? Perhaps we should actually encourage language loss.

The devil's first objection is that we need a common language to understand each other, to conduct commerce, and to get along in peace. Perhaps it's no accident that the countries most advanced technologically are ones with few languages. Multiple languages are just an impediment to communication and progress—at least that's how the devil would argue.

To which I answer: Of course different people need some common language to understand each other! But that doesn't require eliminating minority languages; it only requires bilingualism. We Americans forget how exceptional our monolingualism is by world standards. People elsewhere routinely learn two or more languages as children, with little effort. For example, Denmark is one of the wealthiest and most contented nations in the world. Danes have no problem doing business profitably with other countries, even though practically no one except the 5 million Danes speaks Danish. That's because almost all Danes also speak English, and many speak other foreign languages as well. Still, Danes have no thought of abandoning their tongue. The Danish language, combined with polylingualism, remains indispensable to Danes being happily Danish.

Perhaps you're thinking now, All right, so communication doesn't absolutely require us all to have a single language. Still, though, bilingualism is a pain in the neck that you yourself would rather be spared.

But remember that bilingualism is practiced especially by minority language speakers, who learn majority languages. If they choose to do that extra work, that's their business; monolingual speakers of majority languages have no right or need to prevent them. Minorities struggling to preserve their language ask only for the freedom to decide for themselves—without being excluded, humiliated, punished, or killed for exercising that freedom. Inuits (Eskimos) aren't asking U.S. whites to learn Inuit; they're just asking that Inuit schoolchildren be permitted to learn Inuit along with English.

The devil's second objection is that multiple languages promote strife by encouraging people to view other peoples as different. The civil wars tearing apart so many countries today are determined by linguistic lines. Whatever the value of multiple languages, getting rid of them may be the price we have to pay if we're to halt the killing around the globe. Wouldn't the world be a much more peaceful place if the Kurds would just agree to speak Arabic or Turkish, if Sri Lanka's Tamils would consent to speak Sinhalese, and if the Armenians would switch to Azerbaijani (or vice versa)?

That seems like a very strong argument. But pause and consider: language differences aren't the sole cause, or even the most important cause, of strife. Prejudiced people will seize on any difference to dislike others, including differences of religion, politics, ethnicity, and dress. One of the world's most vicious civil wars today, that in the land that once was Yugoslavia, pits peoples unified by language but divided by religion and ethnicity: Orthodox Serbs against Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians, all speaking Serbo-Croatian. The bloodiest genocide of history was that carried out under Stalin, when Russians killed mostly other Russians over supposed political differences. In the world's bloodiest genocide since World War II, Khmer-speaking Cambodians under Pol Pot killed millions of other Khmer-speaking Cambodians.

If you believe that minorities should give up their languages in order to promote peace, ask yourself whether you believe that minorities should also promote peace by giving up their religions, their ethnicities, their political views. If you believe that freedom of religion but not of language is an inalienable human right, how would you explain your inconsistency to a Kurd or an Inuit? Innumerable examples besides those of Stalin and Pol Pot warn us that monolingualism is no safeguard of peace. Even if the suppression of differences of language, religion, and ethnicity did promote peace (which I doubt), it would exact a huge price in human suffering.

Given that people do differ in language, religion, and ethnicity, the only alternative to tyranny or genocide is for people to learn to live together in mutual respect and tolerance. That's not at all an idle hope. Despite all the past wars over religion, people of different religions do coexist peacefully in the United States, Indonesia, and many other countries. Similarly, many countries that practice linguistic tolerance find that they can accommodate people of different languages in harmony: for example, three languages in Finland (Finnish, Swedish, and Lapp), four in Switzerland (German, French, Italian, and Romansh), and nearly a thousand in Papua New Guinea.

All right, so there's nothing inevitably harmful about minority languages, except the nuisance of bilingualism for the minority speakers. What are the positive advantages of linguistic diversity, to justify that minor nuisance?

One answer is that languages are the most complex products of the human mind, each differing enormously in its sounds, structure, and pattern of thought. But a language itself isn't the only thing lost when a language goes extinct. Each language is indissolubly tied up with a unique culture, literature (whether written or not), and worldview, all of which also represent the end point of thousands of years of human inventiveness. Lose the language and you lose much of that as well. Thus the eradication of most of the world's accumulation of languages would be an overwhelming tragedy, just as would be the destruction of most of the world's accumulated art or literature. We English-speakers would regard the loss of Shakespeare's language and culture as a loss to humanity; Rotokas villagers feel a similar bond to their own language and culture. We are putting millions of dollars into the effort to save one of the world's 8,600 bird species, the California condor. Why do we care so little about most of the world's 6,000 languages, or even desire their disappearance? What makes condors more wonderful than the Eyak language?

A second answer addresses two often-expressed attitudes: “One language is really as good as another,” or conversely, “English is much better than any of those fiendishly complicated Indian languages.” In reality, languages aren't equivalent or interchangeable, and there's no all-purpose “best language.” Instead, as everyone fluent in more than one language knows, different languages have different advantages, such that it's easier to discuss or think about certain things, or to think and feel in certain ways, in one language than another. Language loss doesn't only curtail the freedom of minorities, it also curtails the options of majorities.

Now perhaps you're thinking, Enough of all this vague talk about linguistic freedom, unique cultural inheritance, and different options for thinking and expressing. Those are luxuries that rate low priority amid the crises of the modern world. Until we solve the world's desperate socioeconomic problems, we can't waste our time on bagatelles like obscure Indian languages.

But think again about the socioeconomic problems of the people speaking all those obscure Indian languages (and thousands of other obscure languages around the world). Their problems aren't just narrow ones of jobs and job skills, but broad ones of cultural disintegration. They've been told for so long that their language and everything else about their culture are worthless that they believe it. The costs to our government, in the form of welfare benefits and health care, are enormous. At the same time, other impoverished groups with strong intact cultures—like some recent groups of immigrants—are already managing to contribute to society rather than take from it.

Programs to reverse Indian cultural disintegration would be far better than welfare programs, for Indian minorities and for majority taxpayers alike. Similarly, those foreign countries now wracked by civil wars along linguistic lines would have found it cheaper to emulate countries based on partnerships between proud intact groups than to seek to crush minority languages and cultures.

Those seem to me compelling cultural and practical benefits of sustaining our inherited linguistic diversity. But if you're still unconvinced, let me instead try to persuade you of another proposition: that we should at least record as much information as possible about each endangered language, lest all knowledge of it be lost. For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the world's 6,000 languages, we have either no written information at all, or just brief word lists. If many of those languages do indeed vanish, at least we'd have preserved as much knowledge as possible from irreversible loss.

What is the value of such knowledge? As one example, consider that relationships of the languages that survive today serve to trace the history of human development and migrations, just as relationships of existing animal and plant species trace the history of biological evolution. All linguists agree, for instance, that we can trace existing Indo-European languages back to an ancestral Proto-Indo-European language spoken somewhere in Europe or western Asia around 6,000 years ago. Now some linguists are trying to trace languages and peoples back much further in time, possibly even back to the origin of all human language. Many tiny modern languages, the ones now most at risk of vanishing unrecorded, have proved disproportionately important in answering that question that never fails to interest each of us: Where did I come from?

Lithuanian, for example, is an Indo-European language with only 3 million speakers, and until recently it struggled against Russian for survival. It's dwarfed by the combined total of 2 billion speakers of the approximately 140 other Indo-European languages. Yet Lithuanian has proved especially important in understanding Indo-European language origins because in some respects it has changed the least and preserved many archaic features over the past several thousand years.

Of course, dictionaries and grammars of Lithuanian are readily available. If the Lithuanian language were to go extinct, at least we'd already know enough about it to use it in reconstructing Indo-European language origins. But other equally important languages are at risk of vanishing with much less information about them recorded. Why should anyone care whether four tiny languages, Kanakanabu, Saaroa, Rukai, and Tsou, spoken by 11,000 aborigines in the mountains of Taiwan, survive? Other Asians may eventually come to care a lot, because these languages may constitute one of the four main branches of the giant Austronesian language family. That family, consisting of some 1,000 languages with a total of 200 million speakers, includes Indonesian and Tagalog, two of Asia's most important languages today. Lose those four tiny aboriginal languages and these numerous Asian peoples may lose one-quarter of the linguistic data base for reconstructing their own history.

If you now at last agree that linguistic diversity isn't evil, and might even be interesting and good, what can you do about the present situation? Are we helpless in the face of the seemingly overwhelming forces tending to eradicate all but a few big languages from the modern world?

No, we're not helpless. First, professional linguists themselves could do a lot more than most of them are now doing. Most place little value on the study of vanishing languages. Only recently have a few linguists, such as Michael Krauss, called our attention to our impending loss. At minimum, society needs to train more linguists and offer incentives to those studying the languages most at risk of disappearing.

As for the rest of us, we can do something individually, by fostering sympathetic awareness of the problem and by helping our children become bilingual in any second language that we choose. Through government, we can also support the use of native languages. The 1990 Native American Languages Act actually encourages the use of those languages. And at least as a start, Senate Bill 2044, signed by former President Bush last October, allocates a small amount of money—$2 million a year—for Native American language studies. There's also a lot that minority speakers themselves can do to promote their languages, as the Welsh, New Zealand Maori, and other groups have been doing with some success.

But these minority efforts will be in vain if strongly opposed by the majority, as has happened all too often. Should some of us English-speakers not choose actively to promote Native American languages, we can at least remain neutral and avoid crushing them. Our grounds for doing so are ultimately selfish: to pass on a rich, rather than a drastically impoverished, world to our children.

RANK	LANGUAGE NAME	PRIMARY COUNTRY	POPULATION
1	CHINESE, MANDARIN [CHN}	China	885,000,000
2	SPANISH [SPN]	Spain	332,000,000
3	ENGLISH [ENG]	U.K.	322,000,000
4	BENGALI [BNG]	Bangladesh	189,000,000
5	HINDI [HND]	India	182,000,000
6	PORTUGUESE [POR]	Portugal	170,000,000
7	RUSSIAN [RUS]	Russia	170,000,000
8	JAPANESE [JPN]	Japan	125,000,000
9	GERMAN, STANDARD [GER]	Germany	98,000,000
10	CHINESE, WU [WUU]	China	77,175,000
11	JAVANESE [JAN]	Indonesia, Java, Bali	75,500,800
12	KOREAN [KKN]	Korea, South	75,000,000
13	FRENCH [FRN]	France	72,000,000
14	VIETNAMESE [VIE]	Vietnam	67,662,000
15	TELUGU [TCW]	India	66,350,000
16	CHINESE, YUE [YUH]	China	66,000,000
17	MARATHI [MRT]	India	64,783,000
18	TAMIL [TCV]	India	63,075,000
19	TURKISH [TRK]	Turkey	59,000,000
20	URDU [URD]	Pakistan	58,000,000